Publishing Perspectives tells us of a Guardian report identifying a 25% expansion in the length of the average book (whatever that means) from 1999 and 2014, an increase which the survey’s commissioner blames on the e-book. He suggests that because it’s hard to see that an e-book is long (War and Peace looks identical to The Kreutzer Sonata on your Kindle) we aren’t being put off by the big ones. It’s not entirely clear to me why this size disguise would mean that authors would want to rush in to write more words. Doesn’t it take longer to write a longer book? The argument in fact sounds to me like a bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc, and support to my cynicism is provided by the aside in the Publishing Perspectives post that films have also grown 20% longer over the same timespan.
I have always maintained that the invention of word-processing is what gave us a jump in the length of books. No longer did you need to retype the whole manuscript if you added a sentence on page 6. You just added it and the job automatically reflowed and became that much longer. Out of the window went the old fashioned idea that to fit the extra sentence in on page 6 you might need to make a balancing reduction before the end of page 7: you were free to add stuff ad libitum. But now apparently it’s e-books doing it to us. I wonder if some grumpy, late-nineteenth-century production manager would mutter that the invention of the typewriter had lead to an irresponsible expansion in the length of books: in the good old days having to write the whole thing out in pen and ink meant that you were parsimonious with your words . . .
But who’s going to tell me that there were no long books back then? If Mr Finlayson of Flipsnack were able to demonstrate to me that 21st century books were on average longer than 20th century books, which in turn were longer than 19th century, which than 18th, which than 17th etc., etc., I might be prepared to consider his point. But he doesn’t, and he can’t: so why spend money on such a survey? Another argument justified by his findings (given the cinema factoid) is that somehow in the 21st century we crave long-form entertainment. But even that doesn’t seem right: what about all that handwringing about how our attention spans are all shot to hell, and we are can’t focus on anything longer than 140 characters. Get over it: some books are long; some books are short.
Nate Hoffelder follows up with a Digital Reader post hacking away the data basis of the survey. As he says if one really wanted to know about this one could “run a database search on, say, Amazon’s book listings, sort by publication year, and find the average book length for each year”. That would of course be a laborious way of proving that what we intuit: that the length of books varies about a mean without any influence from the date of publication.
Is the belief that books are getting longer related to the phenomenon that publishers like to bulk some categories of books out to make them look longer than they actually are? I am counter-suggestible in this respect in that for leisure reading I find I increasingly like short books – that I know I shall start and finish. I have a ‘reading pile’ of long ones I liked the idea of reading and bought, but can’t now bear to start in case they consume me for weeks.
I’m not sure, by the way, that it’s generally easier to write a short book than a long one. There is some truth in that quote attributed to Mark Twain, Pascal and many others, ‘I’m sorry to have written such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.’ It can be very difficult to compress one’s flow of words into a concise statement that conveys the essence of what you have to say – which may well be all that your readers or listeners have the patience or the interest to absorb.
Jeremy
All true of course. Maybe contemporary authors are too lazy to write short books! But it does actually take more keystrokes to write a long book: perhaps my units of measurement should have been wrist flexions rather than minutes.
I expect that what you say about paper is indeed part of it, though they did go by page count, so as someone pointed out the size of type is also a relevant variable. But using bulky paper is not something we only recently thought of. We often used to be asked to bulk books out in the last century. Still, who knows whether this was a phenomenon in the 19th century. Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey book is one of those UK trade books which almost fall out of your grasp when you pick them up expecting them to be so heavy that you are muscularly over-prepared for their heft. The US edition will do better in this regard for sure!
[…] your work without laboriously retyping pages of it, did result in longer and longer books. (See Bloat.) She cites David Foster Wallace’s arrogance in wanting to make his Infinite Jest lengthy […]